One of Us Buried by Johanna Craven (year 2 reading books TXT) 📕

hair that reminded me of tussock grass. Forty perhaps. Maybe younger. I knew this place had a way of ageing you. He looked me up and down.

“She’ll do.”

Leaver was building himself a farmhouse on the eastern end of the settlement, downriver from the military barracks. As he led me wordlessly down the front path, I saw a number of what I assumed were government men, constructing the walls of the house from large sandstone bricks. Beyond the skeletal outlines of the new rooms, two wide paddocks had been hacked out of the forest. Sheep and cows dotted the patchy brown grass.

Leaver deposited me in the main house with little more than a nod, abandoning me to his tiny, blonde-haired wife. Mrs Leaver was much younger than her husband, with a soft, doll-like face and dimpled cheeks. I guessed her little more than twenty. She glided around the house with a curly-haired child pinned to her hip.

“It’s good to have you, Eleanor,” she said in a girlish voice. “We’ve just had our last government woman finish her sentence.” She set off down the hallway, gesturing for me to follow. “Quite a shame, I have to say. She were a good worker and all. But never mind. I’m sure you’ll fill her shoes just nicely.” She launched into a rapid tour, waving a hand at each room as we passed. The parlour, the dining room, and this will be my husband’s smoking room… “The place is only half finished, I’m afraid. But we’ve room enough for you to have a little space of your own.” She led me down a small set of stairs off the kitchen, the child squirming out of her arms and barrelling down the hallway like a wild rabbit. Mrs Leaver pushed open a door and nodded at the tiny room. A narrow bed sat against one wall, with a wash basin and chair beside it. “This will be your lodgings. I trust it has everything you need.”

I murmured my thanks. The last time I’d slept in a proper bed, I’d been lying beside Jonathan in Clerkenwell.

“You’ve belongings?” she asked.

I thought of my old stockings and spare dress, tucked into my cloth bag beside my sleeping pallet. I would go for them later that night, when Blackwell was on duty. “Yes,” I managed. “I can fetch them this evening.” It would be far easier, I knew, if I was just to grab my belongings and disappear from his life. Pretend not a thing had passed between us. After all, nothing could come of it. If I hadn’t known that before, I certainly did now.

“Very well.” Mrs Leaver lurched for the child as he made a grab for the candlestick on the nightstand. She swung him back onto her hip. “The windows are due to be cleaned today,” she said. “I trust you can see to that now, please? The polishing rags are in the kitchen. The cook will help you find them.”

Her request was polite and achingly reasonable, but I bristled as I went to the kitchen for the rags. Once I had been the young wife, directing the staff to clean the windows. And now here I was with the polishing cloth in my hand.

My own bitterness infuriated me. How had I managed to dig up a scrap of my old spoiled self when I’d just been hauled from the spinning wheels? I knew women considered themselves lucky when they were chosen to leave the factory. As housemaids and cooks, the hours were better, the food better, the lodgings better. But I’d not had the experience of the other women, had I? I’d not had to sell my body to eat. I’d not taken men behind the factory to pay for a roof over my head.

In the back of my mind, I knew what this grief was really about. That tonight when I slept, I would not hear Blackwell breathing beside me. I hated that I could not control my attraction to him – that in his own quiet, underhand way, he had exerted his power over me.

It was better this way, I told myself, as I wiped acres of dust from the Leavers’ windowsills. Best that I tried to forget.

But that night, when I crawled into my bed, feeling the softness of a mattress beneath me for the first time in two years, I felt nothing but sadness pressing down upon my shoulders.

*

My days became filled with laundry and bed-making, dusting and polishing, and the constant thud of hammers as the Leavers’ house grew up around us.

While Leaver employed a small army of convict farmhands, there were just three of us inside the house; a pink-faced cook who had come over as a free settler and young housemaid, Amy, who broke glasses with disturbing regularity.

One morning, Amy and I made our way into town with an endless list of errands. A thick heat haze drifted up from the land, and the track into town crunched beneath our feet. The tuneless hum of insects rose from the grass.

Amy walked with her eyes down, twisting the corner of her apron around her finger. In the month I’d been at the Leavers’, I’d barely heard a word from her.

“You come over on the Norfolk, didn’t you,” she said as we walked. “You was friends with Hannah.” Her voice was tiny and bell-like.

I felt a tug of guilt then; I’d not had any thought that we’d travelled to this place together, lost in my own thoughts as I’d been for much of the voyage. But yes, with the reminder, I remembered shy, soft-spoken Amy. She’d been one of the youngest convicts on our ship. I guessed her little more than thirteen.

I swatted the flies from my face. “Have you been working for Leaver all this time?”

She nodded. “He took me off the ship. The place weren’t no more than